Antedating the railroad, Pe Ell was settled sometime before 1890 as a small farm community, but the quiet agricultural life was short-lived. In 1892 came the Northern Pacific Railroad line to South Bed, and with it, in 1894, the Yeoman Lumber Company mill, the first of the string of large mills between Chehalis and South Bend. Located in a farming area and midway on the rail line, Pe Ell prospered as a commercial center for logging camps and nearby mill towns along the tracks. In 1920, the school system registered 903 children representing 506 families, figures that indicate a population of no less than 2000 in Pe Ell and vicinity. In 1926, the Yeoman mill burned to the ground, and in the early 1930s the remaining source of town prosperity, the surrounding mill towns, collapsed one after another. By the 1930s the population had withered to less than one-half of its earlier size. [Source: Erickson, Kenneth A. Lumber Ghosts: A Travel Guide to the Historic Lumber Towns of the Pacific Northwest. Boulder, Colorado: Pruett Publishing Co., 1994]